Lord Part 5
Saturday, 22 July 2000
In a message dated 7/22/00, sec writes:
My mother went through this process. My brother, too. They were unable to articulate how it felt, so I really appreciate finally kind of understanding, or at least reading an effective description of it.
Glad the wig is out. Yes, show the scar! I mean, cross-dressing in my youth had some of that in it—fuck your fears of me, it said. At least partially, I get it. Here's another house on the side of the road with the lights on. Anything we can do we will do.
In a message dated 7/22/00, joeys writes:
when you get a chance when you breathe in let it enter your body and as you exhale let all the icky stuff exit. fill your heart with love. let me know when you're up for more company I'm here and I'm not going anywhere.
Susan R. calls. Fat means something different to her now. She wants substance.
I open a card from my mother. Remember the woman who walked back from the Boiling Lake
with a broken leg, she wrote under the get-well message. It will take all the courage you have, but you're strong enough to make it. When I call to thank her, she pulls back. You just have to grit your teeth and get through it. You're lucky, you've been very healthy, and so have I.
Vein hurts. I can see the bruise under the skin. My throat scratches and my eyes are dry, but I am hoping it will be better next time with the burdock and the slippery elm. [End Page 293]
In a message dated 7/22/00, cblord@uci.edu writes to undisclosed recipients:
SUBJECT: HER BALDNESS MEETS JULIA MARIE
There have been many gifts. A beautiful pesto dinner by the front door at an especially dismal moment, a loaf of bread, books and books and books, rides and offers of rides, movie dates, lunches, dinners, hats, bandanas, a paperweight with a moose inside, offers to read out loud. Here's another.
My friend Annie, who is working to grow a new love in San Francisco, left town for a week or so. On Wednesday night she sent me a masseuse called Julia Marie. She advised me that Julia Marie was subtle and asked me to give her a chance. Julia Marie unfolded her table and I sat nervously in the armchair, nothing on under my T-shirt and baggy cotton pants, but of course wearing my little black cap, dreading the prospect of peeling it off for a stranger.
What kind of massage do you do?
She finished unfolding and walked over to me. I believe that there's a blueprint for each of us that was drawn before we were born, even before we were conceived, and that afterward, as we live and change, we deviate from our blueprint. My job is to show you the blueprint, which is what is right about you, so that you yourself can choose to return to it. I do this by manipulating the craniosacral fluid. When I do my deepest work, sometimes I don't even touch people. I go into a
I begin to worry in advance about this encounter. I decide to be Proactive About My Needs. My whole right shoulder hurts, I say, all along the part where a wing would attach if I had one, and I really really need a massage. A classic sort of massage. [End Page 294]
I don't want to see my blueprint in a mirror. I want it not to hurt where it hurts so that I can sleep through the night.
I don't say this part out loud.
OK, says Julia Marie, but I'll give you an idea of what you're missing. She's quite small, she's wearing pressed linen shorts, her sandals are not hip, she doesn't go to a gym. The little black cap pulls off with my T-shirt, making Julia Marie the third person to see my pate, after Kim and after Michelle, the nurse in the oncologist's office who drips the weed killer into the vein of my left arm and who is getting a divorce from her doctor husband because she has learned in her line of work that life is too short not to do what you want to do. Julia Marie has small hands. They heat the oil she uses before it even hits my body. They are so hot they startle. They are hot whether they are on my skin or whether they are half an inch away, cupping the air to follow the shape of my shoulder blade or the side of my neck or the plane of my temple. She works EXTREMELY slowly, drawing long inexorable lines. Her hands push the lines into my muscles and the knots inside feel like speed bumps. She starts at the bottom of my spine and moves up along my back
to the base of the shoulder blade and then over the rotator along my arm. She makes it connect, so that I can feel my shoulder blade as the midpoint between the base of my spine and my fingertips. First she does the right side, the cancer side, the cut side, then she does the left, then my neck and skull, the backs of my legs, then the fronts and finally my chest and belly.
This is not a sexual experience. Neither is it erotic. My body is being learned. I am being gauged, measured, read. My ex-cherie's grandmother used to find truffles in the south of France by watching how flies circled and buzzed until they [End Page 295] finally returned to light on a particular spot of soil. Howard Snow, a fisherman I once had a thing about, could stand on the prow of his boat in the middle of Cape Cod Bay and point beneath the waves to the line where his oyster beds ended and where his neighbor's began. Or imagine the fingertips of a climber patting the rock face above her head to fathom the indentation that will give purchase, or the way a vine knows through its tendrils the air in the crevices of a stone wall, or the way an archaeologist might take her find into her mouth and taste it.
The left side of my body hurts more acutely than the side I had expected to hurt, the right side, the cut side. There, on the cancer side, the pain feels at once more specific and vast in its hollowness, as if it were so ancient that it had forgotten the reason it ever left home and began to hunt for sustenance elsewhere. Julia Marie sits in a chair at the head of the massage table and covers, somehow, the entire top of my head—and my head was, humiliatingly so in Burlington, Iowa, in 1966, the largest head in the entire graduating high school class—somehow Julia Marie covers the entire top of my head with her very small hands.
I don't usually get to say this to people, she says, or I think she says, as she is whispering, but you have a beautiful head. An uncertain interval later she removes her hands, one at a time, first the left and then the right. A tremendous coolness lifts from my scalp.
I think about asking her to move in with us. She has run a pool hall in Bakersfield, sold real estate, managed a gourmet catering business, and produced floral arrangements. Everything makes sense except the real estate. I'd like to make you a gift, she said, I'll come back and show you what I really do.
OK. [End Page 296]
In a message dated 7/22/00, sec writes:
My mother went through this process. My brother, too. They were unable to articulate how it felt, so I really appreciate finally kind of understanding, or at least reading an effective description of it.
Glad the wig is out. Yes, show the scar! I mean, cross-dressing in my youth had some of that in it—fuck your fears of me, it said. At least partially, I get it. Here's another house on the side of the road with the lights on. Anything we can do we will do.
In a message dated 7/22/00, joeys writes:
when you get a chance when you breathe in let it enter your body and as you exhale let all the icky stuff exit. fill your heart with love. let me know when you're up for more company I'm here and I'm not going anywhere.
Susan R. calls. Fat means something different to her now. She wants substance.
I open a card from my mother. Remember the woman who walked back from the Boiling Lake
with a broken leg, she wrote under the get-well message. It will take all the courage you have, but you're strong enough to make it. When I call to thank her, she pulls back. You just have to grit your teeth and get through it. You're lucky, you've been very healthy, and so have I.
Vein hurts. I can see the bruise under the skin. My throat scratches and my eyes are dry, but I am hoping it will be better next time with the burdock and the slippery elm. [End Page 293]
In a message dated 7/22/00, cblord@uci.edu writes to undisclosed recipients:
SUBJECT: HER BALDNESS MEETS JULIA MARIE
There have been many gifts. A beautiful pesto dinner by the front door at an especially dismal moment, a loaf of bread, books and books and books, rides and offers of rides, movie dates, lunches, dinners, hats, bandanas, a paperweight with a moose inside, offers to read out loud. Here's another.
My friend Annie, who is working to grow a new love in San Francisco, left town for a week or so. On Wednesday night she sent me a masseuse called Julia Marie. She advised me that Julia Marie was subtle and asked me to give her a chance. Julia Marie unfolded her table and I sat nervously in the armchair, nothing on under my T-shirt and baggy cotton pants, but of course wearing my little black cap, dreading the prospect of peeling it off for a stranger.
What kind of massage do you do?
She finished unfolding and walked over to me. I believe that there's a blueprint for each of us that was drawn before we were born, even before we were conceived, and that afterward, as we live and change, we deviate from our blueprint. My job is to show you the blueprint, which is what is right about you, so that you yourself can choose to return to it. I do this by manipulating the craniosacral fluid. When I do my deepest work, sometimes I don't even touch people. I go into a
I begin to worry in advance about this encounter. I decide to be Proactive About My Needs. My whole right shoulder hurts, I say, all along the part where a wing would attach if I had one, and I really really need a massage. A classic sort of massage. [End Page 294]
I don't want to see my blueprint in a mirror. I want it not to hurt where it hurts so that I can sleep through the night.
I don't say this part out loud.
OK, says Julia Marie, but I'll give you an idea of what you're missing. She's quite small, she's wearing pressed linen shorts, her sandals are not hip, she doesn't go to a gym. The little black cap pulls off with my T-shirt, making Julia Marie the third person to see my pate, after Kim and after Michelle, the nurse in the oncologist's office who drips the weed killer into the vein of my left arm and who is getting a divorce from her doctor husband because she has learned in her line of work that life is too short not to do what you want to do. Julia Marie has small hands. They heat the oil she uses before it even hits my body. They are so hot they startle. They are hot whether they are on my skin or whether they are half an inch away, cupping the air to follow the shape of my shoulder blade or the side of my neck or the plane of my temple. She works EXTREMELY slowly, drawing long inexorable lines. Her hands push the lines into my muscles and the knots inside feel like speed bumps. She starts at the bottom of my spine and moves up along my back
to the base of the shoulder blade and then over the rotator along my arm. She makes it connect, so that I can feel my shoulder blade as the midpoint between the base of my spine and my fingertips. First she does the right side, the cancer side, the cut side, then she does the left, then my neck and skull, the backs of my legs, then the fronts and finally my chest and belly.
This is not a sexual experience. Neither is it erotic. My body is being learned. I am being gauged, measured, read. My ex-cherie's grandmother used to find truffles in the south of France by watching how flies circled and buzzed until they [End Page 295] finally returned to light on a particular spot of soil. Howard Snow, a fisherman I once had a thing about, could stand on the prow of his boat in the middle of Cape Cod Bay and point beneath the waves to the line where his oyster beds ended and where his neighbor's began. Or imagine the fingertips of a climber patting the rock face above her head to fathom the indentation that will give purchase, or the way a vine knows through its tendrils the air in the crevices of a stone wall, or the way an archaeologist might take her find into her mouth and taste it.
The left side of my body hurts more acutely than the side I had expected to hurt, the right side, the cut side. There, on the cancer side, the pain feels at once more specific and vast in its hollowness, as if it were so ancient that it had forgotten the reason it ever left home and began to hunt for sustenance elsewhere. Julia Marie sits in a chair at the head of the massage table and covers, somehow, the entire top of my head—and my head was, humiliatingly so in Burlington, Iowa, in 1966, the largest head in the entire graduating high school class—somehow Julia Marie covers the entire top of my head with her very small hands.
I don't usually get to say this to people, she says, or I think she says, as she is whispering, but you have a beautiful head. An uncertain interval later she removes her hands, one at a time, first the left and then the right. A tremendous coolness lifts from my scalp.
I think about asking her to move in with us. She has run a pool hall in Bakersfield, sold real estate, managed a gourmet catering business, and produced floral arrangements. Everything makes sense except the real estate. I'd like to make you a gift, she said, I'll come back and show you what I really do.
OK. [End Page 296]
Sunday, 23 July 2000
In a message dated 7/23/00, ebirr writes:
Through several mutual friends I hear that you are going through an ordeal of the medical type. I am just writing to say that I am thinking about you and hope your spirits are good and your health rebounds quickly. I am sure you have great support, but even so, if you need an ear, either of mine is available.
In a message dated 7/23/00, cblord@uci.edu writes to sec:
Why is it that the houses with the lights on always belong to people who have been through it themselves in one way or another? While we're on the subject of frailty, didn't you just have a doctor's appointment?
In a message dated 7/23/00, ebirr writes:
Through several mutual friends I hear that you are going through an ordeal of the medical type. I am just writing to say that I am thinking about you and hope your spirits are good and your health rebounds quickly. I am sure you have great support, but even so, if you need an ear, either of mine is available.
In a message dated 7/23/00, cblord@uci.edu writes to sec:
Why is it that the houses with the lights on always belong to people who have been through it themselves in one way or another? While we're on the subject of frailty, didn't you just have a doctor's appointment?
Monday, 24 July 2000
In a message dated 7/24/00, catgun writes:
i'm sending you all of my love vibes and i'm sorry you're having to go through this. really sorry.
especially about the depression.
love you love you love you i do i do i do
Lunch with Daniel. People hear it's life-threatening and rumors fly, but you're just you.
I am more comfy bald in the world now. The week seems busy. Strong enough to weed.
I worry that I am transforming without Kim, or rather that I am being transformed by the intensity of my life while Kim stays in the same place. As soon as my body feels better, life slides back to normal. I feel both more and less fear of death. I try to imagine but cannot get close to the moment breathing stops. Like Zeno's runner, my mind never reaches the finish line. Half there, and then half there again. [End Page 297]
In a message dated 7/24/00, cblord@uci.edu writes to undisclosed recipients:
SUBJECT: RECENT ACCESSIONS, COLLECTION OF HER BALDNESS
Black Uncle Jer's hat identical to the black Fred Segal's but which cost half as much even NOT on sale
Black wool skullcap, well used, with Nike swoosh and JUST DO ME
Faded burgundy fishing cap with JUST DO IT
Crocheted white skullcap
White cotton summer fez with gold stitching
Embroidered maroon fez with mirror inlays
Blue baseball cap with FIER D'ETRE MARSEILLAIS
In a message dated 7/24/00, catgun writes:
i'm sending you all of my love vibes and i'm sorry you're having to go through this. really sorry.
especially about the depression.
love you love you love you i do i do i do
Lunch with Daniel. People hear it's life-threatening and rumors fly, but you're just you.
I am more comfy bald in the world now. The week seems busy. Strong enough to weed.
I worry that I am transforming without Kim, or rather that I am being transformed by the intensity of my life while Kim stays in the same place. As soon as my body feels better, life slides back to normal. I feel both more and less fear of death. I try to imagine but cannot get close to the moment breathing stops. Like Zeno's runner, my mind never reaches the finish line. Half there, and then half there again. [End Page 297]
In a message dated 7/24/00, cblord@uci.edu writes to undisclosed recipients:
SUBJECT: RECENT ACCESSIONS, COLLECTION OF HER BALDNESS
Black Uncle Jer's hat identical to the black Fred Segal's but which cost half as much even NOT on sale
Black wool skullcap, well used, with Nike swoosh and JUST DO ME
Faded burgundy fishing cap with JUST DO IT
Crocheted white skullcap
White cotton summer fez with gold stitching
Embroidered maroon fez with mirror inlays
Blue baseball cap with FIER D'ETRE MARSEILLAIS
Tuesday, 25 July 2000
In a message dated 7/25/00, jmk writes:
Page 47, "People in Review," Art in America Annual, 2000-2001. If I knew this serious-looking woman to the left of Elizabeth Murray, I might have a conversation with her that goes something like this: Why do you want all that hair? What good is it doing you? Everyone has hair. Mather schmather.
In a message dated 7/25/00, cblord@uci.edu writes to undisclosed recipients:
SUBJECT: HER BALDNESS GETS SOMETHING OFF HER CHEST
Julia Marie asks me to lie on my back with my eyes closed. Her hands cup the air above my ankles. Then she moves to my skull, after which she moves to the base of my spine, placing one hand under my back and the other very lightly on that part of my torso directly above her hand. She moves the bottom hand up slightly. She places the other hand on my lower belly, then on the right pelvic bone, then on the left. It feels like a pond, I tell her. Your [End Page 298] hands are on the banks. There's a tightness in the center, a turbulence rising in the middle. She moves the bottom hand to my thoracic vertebrae and puts the top hand lightly on the center of my chest at the place where the ribs join. She stays. Cold fear rises, the distinct feeling of feet sitting on my chest, yellow hairless animal feet, possibly bird, at any rate a bitter cold damp weight, something waiting and spreading and settling. Julia Marie stays there a long time. Her hands are hot, but it is forever before they warm me. Finally she puts one hand under the base of my neck and the other on my throat. It's all pain in the shoulders and neck and jaw until finally heat runs down sheets of muscle, down my arms down the front of my body down my back.
Shaman, I keep saying to myself. Endure because it will make you stronger. Endure because it will temper you. Go through fire and come out the other side. If you melt metal in a crucible, the molecular structure changes so that it can tolerate greater heat. It seems ridiculously macho. A sweat lodge. Clear air and red rock and thunderstorms. I want them.
There was a vacuum in your chest, Julia Marie says later, two hours later. It pulled my hand into your chest. Usually I don't apply that much pressure.
She hasn't massaged a single muscle of my body, but I come out with barely an ache, completely energized, wanting to giggle, ravenous, wanting to get on with it, not to waste time, to move forward fast and clean.
Near the end, Kim walks in the front door. She feels like such an interloper she doesn't notice the flowers I have brought her. Maybe Julia Marie is the deep thing you're doing right now, she says.
I wake at 4 A.M. The dream camera is [End Page 299] zooming back from a stormy green sea, waves foaming, across which the tiny speck of a boat is moving. The boat is only paper, but it is moving steadily forward.
In a message dated 7/25/00, jmk writes:
Page 47, "People in Review," Art in America Annual, 2000-2001. If I knew this serious-looking woman to the left of Elizabeth Murray, I might have a conversation with her that goes something like this: Why do you want all that hair? What good is it doing you? Everyone has hair. Mather schmather.
In a message dated 7/25/00, cblord@uci.edu writes to undisclosed recipients:
SUBJECT: HER BALDNESS GETS SOMETHING OFF HER CHEST
Julia Marie asks me to lie on my back with my eyes closed. Her hands cup the air above my ankles. Then she moves to my skull, after which she moves to the base of my spine, placing one hand under my back and the other very lightly on that part of my torso directly above her hand. She moves the bottom hand up slightly. She places the other hand on my lower belly, then on the right pelvic bone, then on the left. It feels like a pond, I tell her. Your [End Page 298] hands are on the banks. There's a tightness in the center, a turbulence rising in the middle. She moves the bottom hand to my thoracic vertebrae and puts the top hand lightly on the center of my chest at the place where the ribs join. She stays. Cold fear rises, the distinct feeling of feet sitting on my chest, yellow hairless animal feet, possibly bird, at any rate a bitter cold damp weight, something waiting and spreading and settling. Julia Marie stays there a long time. Her hands are hot, but it is forever before they warm me. Finally she puts one hand under the base of my neck and the other on my throat. It's all pain in the shoulders and neck and jaw until finally heat runs down sheets of muscle, down my arms down the front of my body down my back.
Shaman, I keep saying to myself. Endure because it will make you stronger. Endure because it will temper you. Go through fire and come out the other side. If you melt metal in a crucible, the molecular structure changes so that it can tolerate greater heat. It seems ridiculously macho. A sweat lodge. Clear air and red rock and thunderstorms. I want them.
There was a vacuum in your chest, Julia Marie says later, two hours later. It pulled my hand into your chest. Usually I don't apply that much pressure.
She hasn't massaged a single muscle of my body, but I come out with barely an ache, completely energized, wanting to giggle, ravenous, wanting to get on with it, not to waste time, to move forward fast and clean.
Near the end, Kim walks in the front door. She feels like such an interloper she doesn't notice the flowers I have brought her. Maybe Julia Marie is the deep thing you're doing right now, she says.
I wake at 4 A.M. The dream camera is [End Page 299] zooming back from a stormy green sea, waves foaming, across which the tiny speck of a boat is moving. The boat is only paper, but it is moving steadily forward.
Wednesday, 26 July 2000
Little flecks of stubble when I rub my pate. Mouth sores. Vein still bruised.
Shrink notes that a month ago I couldn't even get a haircut. Are you suicidal? I think about it for the first three or four days after chemo, I reply, but I'm too sick to get it together. She wonders if they are giving me steroids. Depression can be a side effect. I call Michael, excuse me, Dr. Van Scoy-Mosher. I get steroids with the chemo. A few other women have said it made them depressed, he observes, but he doubts the depression is actually an effect of the drug.
Matias calls. Everything is about how to get rid of illness, or how to cure it, he says, but nothing about how just to have it.
Little flecks of stubble when I rub my pate. Mouth sores. Vein still bruised.
Shrink notes that a month ago I couldn't even get a haircut. Are you suicidal? I think about it for the first three or four days after chemo, I reply, but I'm too sick to get it together. She wonders if they are giving me steroids. Depression can be a side effect. I call Michael, excuse me, Dr. Van Scoy-Mosher. I get steroids with the chemo. A few other women have said it made them depressed, he observes, but he doubts the depression is actually an effect of the drug.
Matias calls. Everything is about how to get rid of illness, or how to cure it, he says, but nothing about how just to have it.
In a message dated 7/26/00, cblord@uci.edu writes to undisclosed recipients:
SUBJECT: EPISODES IN THE UNVEILING OF HER BALDNESS
You know about Kim, because, after all, she is my lover and she pated me. I have also told you about Michelle, the oncologist's nurse in the process of getting a divorce who mentioned in passing that she doesn't see the pates of most women she treats because they never remove their hats or wigs in the office. Some women, she is certain, never remove their wigs at home. She thinks most women would rather lose a breast, or both breasts, than lose their hair. I've told you about Julia Marie, reformed real estate agent. These private viewings were followed by a collective unveiling in my support group last week when three of the four bald women decided to show their stuff, led by Glenda, of course, who JUST DID IT, followed by Suzie, and then Her Baldness, who had to put her money where her mouth was since she had started the whole conversation by asking questions about who in our lives [End Page 300] had actually seen our pates. So there we were, applauding ourselves but maybe after the noise had died down feeling a little bare in front of each other, not to mention the therapist and the woman training to set up a cancer center in Japan, and the other therapist in training to work somewhere else, who is learning so much from us, like not to change the subject when people want to talk about cancer, and Louanne, who is neither an observer nor a facilitator but a woman with cancer who has managed to miss the first six or so of her chemo treatments. Sometimes she can't get a ride. Sometimes she wants to change doctors. Sometimes it's just not a good moment. Sometimes her insurance company messes up. Sometimes she has more research she needs to do. Louanne used to teach kindergarten. Last week she cleaned her garage. She threw out all the materials she'd accumulated in twenty years of teaching. Louanne is terrified.
We agreed that pate viewing is a privilege, not a right. Tests of constancy and sincerity and general helpfulness are in order. You don't put out for anyone on the first visit, that's for sure, certainly not for the one-off sort of visitor who wants to eyeball someone on their way out. When they say, I'm so sorry you have this, says Glenda, they really mean, I'm SO glad I don't.
Why do men get to OWN bald, I asked the group. Because they just naturally GO bald, retorted the substitute facilitator, a man. If you think about the statistics, I retort, one in seven, or one in eight, and then figure that if even a third of these women get chemo, there are a lot of bald women out there who are completely invisible as a class. And that's for breast cancer alone. One in three Americans gets some kind of cancer.
But as it turns out, despite our bravery in stripping for each other, not one of us has gone [End Page 301] bald outside the safety of our houses. (Well, once I forgot and went out in the morning to grab the newspapers, but then I dashed back in, looking over my shoulder and feeling like an idiot. So much for organizing the Bald Brigade.) But my question did divide the room into teams: besides the two abstainers—Geraldine, who chose not to remove her wig, and Louanne, who hasn't yet lost her hair—it made it three bald women versus three hairy social workers. For a minute there, hair looked big and dry and pointless, stupid and nasty as tumbleweed. If hair is really the phallus which has been disguised as a fetish for a few centuries, Team Helping Professions dropped the dildo and Team Cancer slid it in gently from downtown.
The next morning, when Kim and I went to see our couples shrink, I whipped off the black cap and Susan, bless her, said WOW, and borrowed my camera to take pictures, which I think in some way enabled me to strip for Annie when she came for a visit in the afternoon, a nervous
moment between friends, I must say. It would be easier to have sex because then at least there's a script of sorts. Annie too said WOW, so I modeled Her Baldness's Collection, Department of Hats, and we settled on the crocheted white Algerian skullcap for a brunch the next day, a smallish affair with people who knew but whom I hadn't spoken to, a cap which says YOU CAN SEE PERFECTLY WELL THROUGH THE HOLES THAT I AM BALD AND IN THIS CASE IF ORNAMENT IS CRIME YOU'RE THE PERPETRATOR.
After that it's been mainly back to the skullcaps, all rolled up so that they sit on the top of my head and you can see the back of my skull, from which, by the way, it being day fourteen, I notice that stubble is just beginning to fall again because I am finding tiny black flecks on my palms. Her [End Page 302] Baldness is getting over herself, she is, liking to rub her hands over the scratchy parts of her scalp, liking the afternoon breeze on the back of her neck, feeling fashionably modernist as an object, getting acquainted with the ears she kept hidden for the entire last half of the twentieth century, imagine that, and realizing that though her entire self-appointed existence as an honorific is a blatant displacement of her fear of mortality, on the other hand the third person is a good one when code is the only way to speak about what nobody wants to say.
SUBJECT: EPISODES IN THE UNVEILING OF HER BALDNESS
You know about Kim, because, after all, she is my lover and she pated me. I have also told you about Michelle, the oncologist's nurse in the process of getting a divorce who mentioned in passing that she doesn't see the pates of most women she treats because they never remove their hats or wigs in the office. Some women, she is certain, never remove their wigs at home. She thinks most women would rather lose a breast, or both breasts, than lose their hair. I've told you about Julia Marie, reformed real estate agent. These private viewings were followed by a collective unveiling in my support group last week when three of the four bald women decided to show their stuff, led by Glenda, of course, who JUST DID IT, followed by Suzie, and then Her Baldness, who had to put her money where her mouth was since she had started the whole conversation by asking questions about who in our lives [End Page 300] had actually seen our pates. So there we were, applauding ourselves but maybe after the noise had died down feeling a little bare in front of each other, not to mention the therapist and the woman training to set up a cancer center in Japan, and the other therapist in training to work somewhere else, who is learning so much from us, like not to change the subject when people want to talk about cancer, and Louanne, who is neither an observer nor a facilitator but a woman with cancer who has managed to miss the first six or so of her chemo treatments. Sometimes she can't get a ride. Sometimes she wants to change doctors. Sometimes it's just not a good moment. Sometimes her insurance company messes up. Sometimes she has more research she needs to do. Louanne used to teach kindergarten. Last week she cleaned her garage. She threw out all the materials she'd accumulated in twenty years of teaching. Louanne is terrified.
We agreed that pate viewing is a privilege, not a right. Tests of constancy and sincerity and general helpfulness are in order. You don't put out for anyone on the first visit, that's for sure, certainly not for the one-off sort of visitor who wants to eyeball someone on their way out. When they say, I'm so sorry you have this, says Glenda, they really mean, I'm SO glad I don't.
Why do men get to OWN bald, I asked the group. Because they just naturally GO bald, retorted the substitute facilitator, a man. If you think about the statistics, I retort, one in seven, or one in eight, and then figure that if even a third of these women get chemo, there are a lot of bald women out there who are completely invisible as a class. And that's for breast cancer alone. One in three Americans gets some kind of cancer.
But as it turns out, despite our bravery in stripping for each other, not one of us has gone [End Page 301] bald outside the safety of our houses. (Well, once I forgot and went out in the morning to grab the newspapers, but then I dashed back in, looking over my shoulder and feeling like an idiot. So much for organizing the Bald Brigade.) But my question did divide the room into teams: besides the two abstainers—Geraldine, who chose not to remove her wig, and Louanne, who hasn't yet lost her hair—it made it three bald women versus three hairy social workers. For a minute there, hair looked big and dry and pointless, stupid and nasty as tumbleweed. If hair is really the phallus which has been disguised as a fetish for a few centuries, Team Helping Professions dropped the dildo and Team Cancer slid it in gently from downtown.
The next morning, when Kim and I went to see our couples shrink, I whipped off the black cap and Susan, bless her, said WOW, and borrowed my camera to take pictures, which I think in some way enabled me to strip for Annie when she came for a visit in the afternoon, a nervous
moment between friends, I must say. It would be easier to have sex because then at least there's a script of sorts. Annie too said WOW, so I modeled Her Baldness's Collection, Department of Hats, and we settled on the crocheted white Algerian skullcap for a brunch the next day, a smallish affair with people who knew but whom I hadn't spoken to, a cap which says YOU CAN SEE PERFECTLY WELL THROUGH THE HOLES THAT I AM BALD AND IN THIS CASE IF ORNAMENT IS CRIME YOU'RE THE PERPETRATOR.
After that it's been mainly back to the skullcaps, all rolled up so that they sit on the top of my head and you can see the back of my skull, from which, by the way, it being day fourteen, I notice that stubble is just beginning to fall again because I am finding tiny black flecks on my palms. Her [End Page 302] Baldness is getting over herself, she is, liking to rub her hands over the scratchy parts of her scalp, liking the afternoon breeze on the back of her neck, feeling fashionably modernist as an object, getting acquainted with the ears she kept hidden for the entire last half of the twentieth century, imagine that, and realizing that though her entire self-appointed existence as an honorific is a blatant displacement of her fear of mortality, on the other hand the third person is a good one when code is the only way to speak about what nobody wants to say.
Thursday, 27 July 2000
Blood count 2900, burning pee. Nutritionist gives me stuff for the kidneys and says, after taking her digs at the medical profession, that I look in astoundingly good shape. Make an appointment with radiation oncologist. Find a silent retreat in Massachusetts. When I tell Kim, she is disappointed. She wants to be together afterward. OK. I don't need to run to the other side of the country to be still.
In a message dated 7/27/00, cblord@uci.edu writes to undisclosed recipients:
SUBJECT: RECENT ACCESSIONS, COLLECTION OF HER BALDNESS, DEPARTMENT OF GETTING ON WITH IT
It will grow back.
It will grow back without gray.
Show the scar.
It will grow back curly.
It's a gift to have someone unadorned, that naked, living her or his life bald, living her life right there, in front of you.
You can pull off Che.
It will grow back straight.
Maybe there's a kind of utopian pleasure to shedding the phallus (or is that something only a relatively affluent white male can say?).
By the time it grows back you won't want it. [End Page 303]
It might grow back a different color.
You have great bones.
You can get away with it.
People might think you're a Buddhist nun.
Look at all those toupees.
You've turned into a hip chick.
Sigourney Weaver was fucking hot without hair.
Experience is the comb that nature gives us when we are bald.
Blood count 2900, burning pee. Nutritionist gives me stuff for the kidneys and says, after taking her digs at the medical profession, that I look in astoundingly good shape. Make an appointment with radiation oncologist. Find a silent retreat in Massachusetts. When I tell Kim, she is disappointed. She wants to be together afterward. OK. I don't need to run to the other side of the country to be still.
In a message dated 7/27/00, cblord@uci.edu writes to undisclosed recipients:
SUBJECT: RECENT ACCESSIONS, COLLECTION OF HER BALDNESS, DEPARTMENT OF GETTING ON WITH IT
It will grow back.
It will grow back without gray.
Show the scar.
It will grow back curly.
It's a gift to have someone unadorned, that naked, living her or his life bald, living her life right there, in front of you.
You can pull off Che.
It will grow back straight.
Maybe there's a kind of utopian pleasure to shedding the phallus (or is that something only a relatively affluent white male can say?).
By the time it grows back you won't want it. [End Page 303]
It might grow back a different color.
You have great bones.
You can get away with it.
People might think you're a Buddhist nun.
Look at all those toupees.
You've turned into a hip chick.
Sigourney Weaver was fucking hot without hair.
Experience is the comb that nature gives us when we are bald.
Friday, 28 July 2000
In a message dated 7/28/00, jmk writes:
Owning bald is about as rewarding as owning a piece of land that's ten feet under (piranha-infested) water. One boy's view: you bald girls are ok.
In a message dated 7/28/00, sharha writes:
If I didn't have such a fat head and fatter round fat face then I would do it, because my hair is completely gray and it doesn't go with my Clearasil complexion, so I keep dyeing it every two weeks and it falls out in huge dry piles everywhere and I spend several minutes a day scooping it up and thinking, yup, I'm making myself lose my hair and brain cells because I'm vain.
Linda's fiftieth birthday today. She is celebrating quietly with her friend Louise, shopping for the little things she likes to buy, my sad little sister with a big heart who has just sent me a subscription to Yoga Journal.
Lunch with Annie. We talk about sex and shame. Alicia B. wanders up. She doesn't ask. I don't tell.
In a message dated 7/28/00, jmk writes:
Owning bald is about as rewarding as owning a piece of land that's ten feet under (piranha-infested) water. One boy's view: you bald girls are ok.
In a message dated 7/28/00, sharha writes:
If I didn't have such a fat head and fatter round fat face then I would do it, because my hair is completely gray and it doesn't go with my Clearasil complexion, so I keep dyeing it every two weeks and it falls out in huge dry piles everywhere and I spend several minutes a day scooping it up and thinking, yup, I'm making myself lose my hair and brain cells because I'm vain.
Linda's fiftieth birthday today. She is celebrating quietly with her friend Louise, shopping for the little things she likes to buy, my sad little sister with a big heart who has just sent me a subscription to Yoga Journal.
Lunch with Annie. We talk about sex and shame. Alicia B. wanders up. She doesn't ask. I don't tell.
Saturday, 29 July 2000
In a message dated 7/29/00, cwolf writes:
Remember, I'm only a flight away—and Jennifer said she would give me a good reference. She also said—Catherine? No problem. She's as stubborn as I am. [End Page 304]
In a message dated 7/29/00, cwolf writes:
Remember, I'm only a flight away—and Jennifer said she would give me a good reference. She also said—Catherine? No problem. She's as stubborn as I am. [End Page 304]
Sunday, 30 July 2000
One of our old Saturdays: yoga, errands, Eames show, Barney's, beach walk, or rather beach sit, dinner and a video at home. Her Baldness is less sorry for herself today. Truth is that when I feel better—physically strong and OK about my appearance—I don't want to think about death or chemo. Truth is also that when I feel better I forget the side effects of weed killer. All I have to remind me today is a bald head and a vein in my arm that hurts. I can feel knots under the skin.
Her Baldness is getting full of herself.
One of our old Saturdays: yoga, errands, Eames show, Barney's, beach walk, or rather beach sit, dinner and a video at home. Her Baldness is less sorry for herself today. Truth is that when I feel better—physically strong and OK about my appearance—I don't want to think about death or chemo. Truth is also that when I feel better I forget the side effects of weed killer. All I have to remind me today is a bald head and a vein in my arm that hurts. I can feel knots under the skin.
Her Baldness is getting full of herself.
Monday, 31 July 2000
In a message dated 7/31/00, dvisse writes:
I've been thinking for months that I'd like to see a SPARKS game. I was hoping that if I could get tickets, you might want to come.
In a message dated 7/31/00, debobr writes:
So "most women" would rather lose breasts than hair, eh? I wonder if they feel that way after the hair grows back, which it does. We're alive, dammit. That's beauty enough.
Chemo Three on Thursday. Three and a half weeks until the last one. Four and a half weeks until the worst of the effects, knock mouse on the wooden desktop, are over. I make the list. What if a blood clot floats off? What if I have to have one of those ports surgically implanted in my chest? What if Kim leaves me? What if Linda doesn't do the dishes?
Immense slothfulness, like frostbite. It scratches when I turn my head on the pillow. Soft down is
growing back among the stubble.
________________________________________________________
Catherine Lord is professor of studio art at the University of California, Irvine, as well as an artist, curator, and writer. She is currently working on an illustrated encyclopedia of the island of Dominica titled The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men.
Note
Portions of this text first appeared in Art Journal, spring 2002, published by the College Art Association.
In a message dated 7/31/00, dvisse writes:
I've been thinking for months that I'd like to see a SPARKS game. I was hoping that if I could get tickets, you might want to come.
In a message dated 7/31/00, debobr writes:
So "most women" would rather lose breasts than hair, eh? I wonder if they feel that way after the hair grows back, which it does. We're alive, dammit. That's beauty enough.
Chemo Three on Thursday. Three and a half weeks until the last one. Four and a half weeks until the worst of the effects, knock mouse on the wooden desktop, are over. I make the list. What if a blood clot floats off? What if I have to have one of those ports surgically implanted in my chest? What if Kim leaves me? What if Linda doesn't do the dishes?
Immense slothfulness, like frostbite. It scratches when I turn my head on the pillow. Soft down is
growing back among the stubble.
________________________________________________________
Catherine Lord is professor of studio art at the University of California, Irvine, as well as an artist, curator, and writer. She is currently working on an illustrated encyclopedia of the island of Dominica titled The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men.
Note
Portions of this text first appeared in Art Journal, spring 2002, published by the College Art Association.
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Discussion of "Lord Part 5"
Accessories again
Attention to her accessories again. Markers of gender have shifted to markers of illness.I have always found the use of hats vs. wigs vs. a bare head, to cover the head of a bald cancer patient a very personal choice and it disgusts me that I am often tempted to beg the questions, "why do you choose to wear a wig?" or "why cover your head with a bright colored hat that matches your outfit?". I am curious mainly because those that I do know that have had bald heads due to cancer, have very specific and unique answers as to why they choose to present themselves in this way.
Posted on 23 April 2013, 4:17 am by Jade Ulrich | Permalink
JM
I am happy to see her find relief with character Julia Marie. What makes her finally relax? trusting? accepting? while she can be distant from friends, maybe letting a stranger into her life when she is exposed and vulnerable is easier and more manageable. is that always the case?Posted on 25 April 2013, 4:12 am by sophy | Permalink
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