A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [22]
The wig had been terrifically expensive, and Bridget had gone to great lengths to find it. During her first three-week treatment, she had traveled from the Boston suburb in which she lived to New York City on the advice of a friend who’d known of a wig shop in Brooklyn that was supposed to be the Rolls-Royce of wig makers (sheitel machers, Bridget had learned). Bridget had spent the night at a hotel in Manhattan and then had taken a long taxi ride to the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, noting the sharp demarcation of the neighborhood with its Hebrew signs and kosher shops. She’d entered the unprepossessing wig shop full of doubts, aware of herself as an outsider and yet welcomed in a kind of chaotic way to the back room. There, as she had waited for the owner, who would tend to her and who would become something of a confidante in the weeks following the initial fitting, Bridget had stared into the mirror, unable to keep from watching a drama that was unfolding in the chair next to her. A woman who could not have been older than eighteen was trying on a newly made wig for the first time. The girl seemed young for her age, about to spiral out of control in the way that adolescent girls sometimes could—alternately delighted with her wig, and then snapping at her mother, snatching the wig off her head as if it were diseased, and then sobbing. The girl would be married in two days, Bridget learned (calculating that the wedding date would be a Wednesday; odd to get married on a Wednesday), and would have her head shaved just before the ceremony. The Orthodox tradition to which the girl belonged forbade a married woman from showing her hair to anyone but her husband. The young woman would wear her wig for the rest of her life. The girl had an astonishingly beautiful head of hair, thick and long and shiny, and Bridget could not believe that she would in two days’ time allow someone to cut it off, the image harsh and reminiscent of Jewish concentration camps or of French female collaborators during World War II. The minutes that Bridget had spent in that back room had seemed among the most foreign of her life (the most difficult to translate), and it was only when the owner came in and gently put her fingers through Bridget’s short (and surely foreign in this setting) hair that Bridget had rattled back to the reality of her cancer and to the reason why she was visiting the shop.
It had taken three trips to Brooklyn to complete the process, each journey more arduous than the last as Bridget had progressed through the treatments—the last trip nearly desperate since she was by then losing her hair at a rapid clip. Bill had arranged for a car to pick Bridget up at home and deliver her to the now-familiar, even comfortable, sheitel macher, where the staff had greeted her like an old friend. The car had waited for Bridget and then had taken her home, a round-trip of thirteen hours and costing Bill nearly a thousand dollars, every penny of which, Bridget later decided, was worth it.
Bridget was used to the wig now and even liked its convenience (she could wake up, put it on, and have instantly perfect hair), though it became an unwelcome inanimate object in the bed on the nights when Bill slept over. The most difficult part of the cancer was not the fear of death or the treatments themselves but rather, Bridget had decided, the loss of dignity, particularly excruciating in the run-up to a wedding.
The cancer had taken Bridget by surprise, and she’d been slow to accept its reality. She remembered the routine appointment for a mammogram in late August, her third since she’d turned forty, and the way she’d casually whined to Bill beforehand about how tedious and uncomfortable the process was. After the mammogram, Bridget had waited in a claustrophobic cubicle at the radiologist’s, feeling naked in her hospital gown. She’d half read an article in Family Circle about how to stretch three meals into nine, all the while expecting to be dismissed as had happened on her