My mother had her hair done (it was her first time out of the house, after that first hospital visit), and then went directly to the wigmakers and ordered three wigs from each of them, so that they could copy exactly the appearance of her hair when it was freshly coiffed. My mother did not show any interest in getting a fun wig; she did not want to try new possibilities. My mother had spent some years negotiating the hairstyle that suited her; she had changed it when and as her age had demanded that she do so; and she was not going to change it again now. For the few weeks that her own hair was to last, she kept reaching up and touching it, patting it into place as though to memorize her own gestures and their effect for an unspecified future period. She arranged with her hairdresser to keep free her nine-thirty appointment on Mondays and Thursdays, so that she could take it up again when her hair came back, as all the doctors promised that it would. For the sake of my father and Freddy and me, my mother imagined such a time.

“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.