A Mrs. America weekend in L.A., with Johnny Carson, we agreed. The Tonight Show Friday night. And Saturday? Something other than Miss America, we decided. Who could spend a wild weekend in Los Angeles staying in a hotel room and watching an outdated beauty pageant, anyway?
We booked rooms in the hotel Brett was staying in—four rooms, because we couldn't imagine Linda would want to share a room, and it seemed wrong for any of the rest of us to exclude her by doing so ourselves.
“And we'll cut our hair,” Ally announced.
“Cut our hair?” Kath said.
“Cut it off,” Ally said. “Cut it all off, heavens to Betsy. It will give us some idea of what she's going through, shrugging off that one crutch we rely on to feel we're feminine.”
I thought of how Ally had felt all those years, doubting her femininity because she wasn't able to have a baby. I tried to imagine myself without my mop of unruly dishwater blond hair—not gorgeous, but still so much a part of who I was.
“Shave it off?” I said quietly, trying to imagine walking out my front door with my skull showing, bald and free.
No one answered, though everyone had heard me.
I tried to imagine all of us standing before Linda, pulling off wigs or caps to reveal that we, like her, were smooth as our newborn babies' little bottoms had been. I would cry if the Wednesday Sisters did that for me. I would cry at their choosing to go through what I had no choice but to endure myself.
But I wasn't Linda.
I found a smile creeping up from the pit of my stomach. “She'll laugh,” I said. “Somehow I know it will make her laugh. I'd do it just for that.”
“She could sure stand to laugh a spell,” Kath said. “And it's what she'd do for us, sure enough.”
It was what she would do for us, we all agreed. Everyone except Brett, who sat silently looking down at her gloves.
Kath reached over and put a hand on Brett's. “But Brett can't,” she said. “She'd be nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs fixin' to go on Johnny Carson with a shaved head.”
“I could wear a wig?” Brett said, but the rise in her voice told everything. This was her big moment, and she was dreading it already. She could no more appear on The Tonight Show with her head shaved than she could with her gloves off.
“You can't do that, Brett,” I said.
“It will be hot enough under the lights without a wig on,” Ally agreed.
Brett nodded, but there was something unconvincing in it, as if she couldn't stand to have hair if the rest of us were bald.
“Henry Adams said, ‘One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible,’” she said. “What is it we've done so right in our lives that has made us five?”
“We'll be your big ol' bald fan club,” Kath said, “the good Lord willin' and the creek don't rise.” And we all, again, agreed. There wasn't a hint of conviction in our voices, though. I was sure when the time came we would talk ourselves out of this. We'd justify our cowardice or convince ourselves it would embarrass Linda. Or maybe we'd just plain lose our nerve.
WHEN THE BIG EVENING CAME, we were seated side by side, Kath and Ally and Linda and I together on the aisle in the third row, with Brett waiting backstage. I felt as if I were in a dream, as if none of this could be happening. I could not possibly be that little girl who grew up in suburban Chicago, who went to Catholic school and played the French horn and went on to be a secretary. I could not possibly have married the smartest guy at Northwestern and moved to a place I'd never heard of, two thousand miles away from my family, with my two children in tow. Most of all, I could not be the woman who'd just been accepted to Stanford—my admissions letter had come in the mail that morning, just before we left!—and made these wonderful friends with whom I was now sitting, and published a novel myself and helped my friend who was now here, waiting to sit next to Johnny Carson and talk about The Mrs. Americas as if she were Harper Lee.
I could not possibly be sitting here with a wig scratching against my shaved scalp, knowing that Kath and Ally were bald underneath their wigs, too.
We'd thought we would buy wigs that looked like our hair, but that turned out to be more difficult than you would think. So we went to the other extreme. We bought wigs that were nothing at all like our own hair. I was a sleekly cropped strawberry blonde, Ally a longer-haired honey blonde which, with her pale skin, looked more probable than you might have thought. Kath hadn't changed her color—she was still brunette, every other shade she'd tried on had looked just ludicrous—but she'd gone for short and curly, which opened up her face, made her cheekbones more prominent. When she'd first tried it on, before we'd actually shaved our heads, we'd all said more or less in unison something like, “Wow.” We'd said maybe she should cut her hair short, and she'd smiled—a big white smile in her uncovered face—and said, “I'm planning to, don't you know? I'm thinking mighty short.”