The next morning I skipped my shower and a comb through and
pushed my hair around again trying to get some height, before I went to
breakfast. After checking out, our three bikes rode out together. When we
stopped for coffee I again removed my helmet but the amount of hair left behind
made it look like I had been wearing a long-haired cat on my head. I stopped
removing my helmet for quick breaks, like at petrol stations. Keeping my helmet
on made me sound like I was under water. But thankfully no one questioned why I
didn’t remove my helmet to make my muffled quips more understandable. At
lunchtime I ran to the ladies room and when I took off my helmet I felt cool
air at the back of my head. I was nervous I would be completely bald before we
got to Auckland. I wanted the trip to be over. When we got on the road again,
Alex said something about stopping at a pub on the way home. I could have
killed him. Luckily it began to rain and with a cheery wave on the motorway,
everyone headed in different directions.
At home I tore
off my motorcycle gear, went into my room and held up a mirror. On the top of
my head the hair had thinned dramatically making my forehead look much
higher. The cool air I had been feeling
at the back of my head was a bald spot. Alex saw my face and tried to comfort
me by making sexual advances. I began to question if he had some hidden fetish.
How could looking at a middle-aged balding woman possibly be sexy? It was more
like a scary movie. My human-self had peeled away to reveal the hidden monster.
It was horrifying.
To add to an increasingly
black mood, Alex announced that we might have to tell people. The loss of
control hit me like a ton of bricks. I couldn’t stop my hair from falling out
but I could wrestle the control of information from him. I told him I would
tell people as I felt the need to.
I had to get
control back over my body. I took a shower and combed and combed my hair
roughly. Every tine grabbed what it could wrap itself around and held on. I
methodically raked, dumping the results in the bin. The strong combing made me
feel better, stronger. I would show my stupid head who was boss. But when I
finished combing, I realised Alex was right. How was I ever going to hide this?
By the end of May
I did not have enough hair to go out in public. The wig stayed stubbornly in its
box. Instead I found an old knitted hat. It was white and thick and had “New
Zealand” printed in green letters across the front. I hadn’t worn it since I
went skiing at Mt Ruapehu five years earlier. It had been in a bin of hats and
gloves and jackets ever since, and a moth had had a taste or two. This unlikely
hat and I became best friends. I wore it to the supermarket, the DIY store,
walking to the mailbox and in the car. I wore it watching TV and making dinner.
I even slept in it.
But as much as I loved my hat, it felt odd in certain
circumstances like sitting at a café having a cup of coffee. A knitted hat was
something I associated with youth; a male skateboarder or a girl with lots of
rope bracelets and a pierced nose. They would wear the hat pulled out straight
so it hung at the back of their heads like a deflated balloon. It was not the
sort of thing a fifty year old wore to have a cup of coffee at a café unless
she had a devastatingly bad haircut. So I had to take the plunge.
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