“This treatment may make you feel nauseated for a few weeks, and wholly exhausted, and may cause general malaise,” the doctors warned. But my mother could contain those difficulties. “What about my hair?” she would ask. The loss of her hair was like the loss of herself; when she went to those wigmakers (those horrible depressing basement offices), it was as though she were getting the most meager protection for a war with the world. She was like a bleached zebra getting stripes put on with ink. If it was hard for her to think of herself as a woman with cancer, obliged to submit to chemical assault, then it was twice as difficult for her to think of herself as a woman without hair, reliant on petty artifice. There is nothing to be accomplished by focusing on your own cancer; you cannot change it by an act of will. Her hair distracted her: she attached herself to its changes to avoid thinking too relentlessly about the changes within her body. She suffered over the passing humiliation as a means to circumnavigate the prospect of death. I volunteered to come along with her to the wigmakers’ studios, but my mother took only my father. She took him because she could not face these things alone, but she left Freddy and me behind because she could not bear for anyone else to see them. At the time, I was just as glad; the few hours I got alone were a welcome relief from the intense claustrophobia of the vigil, which I felt then might easily go on forever.

I never saw my mother without hair. During the entire period of her illness, she wore wigs outside, and turbans around the house. She hated those turbans; my father told her that she looked like Gloria Swanson, but though she laughed, she told him he was being ridiculous, and believed that to be so. My father, too, was kept away from her humiliation. She would close the bathroom door when she was changing from wig to wig or from wig to turban, and she slept in those turbans as well. “I’d rather you not remember me bald,” she said, “and once you saw it, you’d remember it.” How much she looked at herself without hair I was never to know, but for the rest of us her baldness was little more than a verbal construct. It influenced all of our lives, and she and my father were to develop elaborate routines around it. He would intercept coat-check girls lest they tip the wig forward; he would walk between my mother and the wind when they were outside; but he would also pretend not to know that my mother was, in fact, hairless, and if her turban ever slipped in the night, I think he contrived not to see it.

• • •

“You have to get back and start working on your recording,” my mother said one afternoon. “You’ve already missed enough. You have to keep your engagements for next month.”