Wig Shop by Rebecca Bernard
“Did I ever finish my story? I mean this woman was seriously one of the worst customers I’ve had in a while—a total hair-mare.” June nudges Laine, who nods but doesn’t look up from her nearly empty glass.
June licks her lips and continues, “But I was professional—I mean I went out of my way to show her all the different styles, not just what’s popular now but the classic stuff, too, you know? Like the bob?” June finishes her drink and sighs to herself. But it hadn’t mattered how professional she’d been because this was one of those types. All set to make her feel shitty, like it was June’s fault she was in the store in the first place, June’s idea she buy herself a wig. “And so I’m seriously doing my best—”
“June?”
“Yeah?”
“What time is it?”
“What?” asks June.
“It’s got to be after midnight. I need to go home.”
June raises her empty glass. “One more? Please?”
Laine sighs.
“I’ll get this round.” June leans forward on her stool, signaling the bartender’s attention, and shifting her gaze to smile at the long-haired guy at the far end of the bar who’s been sitting there almost as long as she and Laine. He smiles back, but then turns to the woman who’s joined him. June looks away.
Summer in Austin in the early aughts. A warm breeze blows in mixing with the candy stink of dried beer. June watches the new drinks arrive. Vodka floating around cubes of ice. She takes the sweating glasses and passes one to Laine.
“Cigarette?” says June.
“All right,” says Laine.
As they head outside, June glances back at the man at the bar, but he’s still talking to the red-haired woman beside him. He doesn’t look up, doesn’t see her.
June smiles anyhow, touches her hair, smooths a blond strand back into place.
#
“Can I help you find something?” June stepped out from behind the counter and approached the red-faced woman who stood rigid in the entryway of the store.
A brunette, mid-thirties, hair just perceptibly thinning. Hands balled into fists by her sides. The woman eyed the front display of party hair. Neon dyes and Mohawks. A wall of pixie cuts in every color. “You sell natural wigs?”
“Sure.” June nodded.
The door to the wig shop opened, and two young women entered mid-conversation, the taller one saying something to make the shorter one bend over in laughter. They brushed past the red-faced woman, heading to the back of the store.
“So?” The woman looked at June.
June bit her lip. “Well. Did you want to stay with your natural hair color? That’s usually where we like to start.”
The woman frowned, impassive.
“You look like you’re a chestnut, would you agree?”
“Chestnut? My hair is brown.”
“How about we say light brown. Is that what you’d like to stick with?”
The woman rolled her eyes. “Why would I change my hair color? The whole point is to pretend it’s real, isn’t it?” The woman crossed her arms against her chest.
June shrugged. “You’re right.” She picked up a light brown wig and smoothed the bangs. “Though some people prefer a chance at being someone new.”
#
Outside, at the picnic tables, Laine and June light cigarettes and look for a place to sit amid the throng of summer bodies. Just past midnight, and the night’s still hot. Christmas lights glow along the chain-link fence enclosing the row of picnic tables.
They find a spot at the end of a table occupied by a group of men in khakis and button-downs, unusual dress for this bar at this hour. But Laine doesn’t seem to notice, so June doesn’t comment, instead asks her friend questions about Aaron, Laine’s now live-in boyfriend. Maybe not such a big deal for someone in their mid-twenties, but what feels like a big deal to June.
June asks if they’ve talked any further about whether to adopt a dog, now that they share a house, just the two of them, and Laine, excited, describes their trip to the local shelter, the red hound mix that she and Aaron immediately fell for. “Such a sweet baby.” As Laine gushes, June feels the familiar tic of being left behind, not just the dog, but the moving in, the partnering off even, if that didn’t sound so dumb. So embarrassing. June takes a long drag off her cigarette and does her best to refocus on Laine. Her pretty head. Not the men to her left, sharing their table.
“We want to name him Frank. What do you think?”
“I like Frank.”
“Or Matty? That’s Aaron’s idea.”
“I like Frank better.” Or one little look can’t hurt. June glances toward the guy closest to her, smiles as she chews her straw.
Laine shakes her head. “June?”
“Yeah?”
“Really?”
June shrugs. “What?”
“You know I’m only staying out for you.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.” Laine puts out her cigarette. “But really, I have to wake up so early anyways.”
June reaches forward to catch Laine’s arm. “Please don’t go.”
“I’m closing my tab.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
And June’s alone. Oh, well. She turns to the guy sitting closest to her and twirls a strand of hair around her finger. There are four guys in the group to her right. Older, but not old, probably mid-thirties. They look friendly, approachable.
“Got a light?”
The guy closest to her nods. “Sure.” He holds out the lighter, and June takes out a fresh cigarette.
“Thanks. My friend just—” June whistles to indicate Laine’s departure.
“Yeah?” The guy smiles at her, readjusts his glasses.
“Yeah.” June smiles back, exhaling smoke from her lips. She holds the smile slightly longer than she would if she didn’t mean it.
It doesn’t take long for June to learn their names. Mark. Travis. Oscar. Ryan. And to learn that two of them are married, one is engaged, one single. They are Nice Guys, she can tell. Nice guys who are happy to talk to her, now that she’s been stranded. Nice Guys that don’t mind a little female companionship. A little harmless flirtation.
Laine returns with her classic worried look, eyebrows raised. And June does her best to deflect because what does Laine know? Laine goes home to Aaron so what if June gets to go home, too.
Laine doesn’t sit down. “I’m taking off. You good?”
“Yep. Leaving after this drink.”
Laine nods hesitant as usual. Tells June to be careful, she’ll call her in the morning, okay? and June breathes out, relieved, in a way, to be left alone. She watches her friend go, weaving her way around the tables, then she’s gone.
June puts the cigarette to her lips, exhales a small cloud of smoke. She senses the man to her left watching her, but she doesn’t look at him, not right away. No, for now she looks up at the sky, nothing visible with all the lights of the bar, but beautiful still. The potential of what she knows is there. All that starlight, even if it’s not for her to see.
#
June had never dealt with anyone this difficult in her nine-month tenure at Big Wig. Normally customers were either all business or there for a gag, but this lady seemed to take everything June did as a personal affront.
They started with shoulder-length chestnut brown waves. A classic. But then the wig-cap was too tight. And then it was too loose. And then the woman claimed the hair was synthetic when June knew for a fact it wasn’t. And when a piece of the woman’s real hair came out in June’s hand, which happens, it does—especially with the cancer patients—but right then it was about the worst timing ever.
“I promise we’ll find something, Ma’am. Something that makes you feel like yourself even,” June said combing out a fourth chestnut wig, a take on the shag.
June watched the woman study her own face in the mirror. She’d tried on a reddish-brown wig, against June’s advice, and now her cheeks looked tinged by fire. The woman wouldn’t break eye contact with her own eyes.
June forced her smile bigger. “I know there’s something here that’ll do the trick. There always is, I promise.”
The woman shook her head and pulled the fake hair off her scalp. She tossed the wig to the counter where it landed like a discarded animal. “How can you make that promise?”
June shrugged. She couldn’t, of course. “We’ll just keep trying till something works.”
#
After Laine leaves, one of the married guys asks June if she wants another drink.
She does. Thank you. While she waits for the drink she learns about these men. Two of them work in programming. Another is a lawyer. The single one’s an architect. They’re old friends, and the one who’s newly engaged is visiting, hence the late hour on a weeknight.
In turn, June fills them in on the wig shop.
“I had the most intense customer today. This woman—what we call a hair-mare. That’s like a bald woman who’s pissed about being bald so she takes it out on us. But anyways, she comes in right when I’m starting work, first thing in the morning and—”
“—You’re totally wearing a wig, aren’t you?”
June hesitates, looks at the men. “Duh. I only wear wigs.”
“Mark needs a wig!” And the guys laugh, and June laughs, too and sips her drink.
They buy another round, and she feels her drunkenness like light, all their attention radiating off her cheekbones, her twentysomething decolletage. How easy Laine makes it look, to be loveable, chosen. But it isn’t easy, June knows. No guarantee in finding someone to love you, so what’s wrong with lust, the next best thing.
Gradually, the men shift seats so that June sits next to the single one. Not subtle, but that doesn’t matter, not to her at least. In a way, she feels bad for him, unmarried amongst this group of married or soon-to-be married men. And he isn’t bad looking; he seems kind. Sweet, even. The way he looks at her as she talks, nodding his head and then moving his arm so it’s brushing hers, that electric spark.
And that’s the best part, right? The build-up, the precarity. Sitting beside someone absorbing their interest, and so what if it’s because she’s a woman, an available girl. No, Laine doesn’t get it. It’s easy to make someone want you, June. But it isn’t always, June knows.
Mark, who’s married and balding suggests they all leave the bar, which is about to close, and head back to his house. “We can hang out on my roof. I’ve got beer, and I put some lawn chairs up there. You should come.”
June pretends to think it over, but knows she’ll say yes. She’ll be tired tomorrow, but what does tired matter when she’s awake now? As she closes her tab, she allows herself to picture her empty apartment, moonlight middling on the floor and only her to see it.
#
The job at Big Wig had started as a joke. A break from the service industry which had been her mainstay during college and continued in the three years since graduation when the future felt mushier than she’d expected. She was meant to be an adult, but she wasn’t ready yet, or she didn’t know exactly what being an adult meant. She paid rent. She paid for her cell phone. She drank at bars and had sex with men she found attractive. She thought about her degree in art, but without deadlines, the drive had melted away. At least the wigs offered a kind of creativity. Remaking people, offering them fresh selves.
Laine wasn’t great at understanding, or maybe she understood but her own life looked so different, so she had trouble sympathizing. A live-in boyfriend. A nine-to-five, even if she hated it. Now, a dog? The two friends had moved to Austin together from Philly, and June loved Laine, but Laine didn’t get June’s stasis. In work—why not try for a real job or at least just paint something? And with men. If you just want sex, that’s one thing, but do you?
What are you looking for, June? Do you even know? But what did Laine know? June preened the wigs and slipped one on, gazed in the mirror. She looked like herself, but also, she didn’t. One hundred nights with the same person—was that more or less than a hundred nights with different people? New bodies, new insights into the world? Who could believe the same person would want you a hundred times, no. Each person, a rich little memory—Laine, I’m the one who’s really living!
At least a surface truth.
#
When they get to Mark’s house, a short two blocks from the bar, he whispers for everyone to be quiet, to not wake his wife, which given their state is easier said than done.
June follows the guys through the side gate into the backyard. The night still hot. The air, sticky. She isn’t afraid of these men, though she knows Laine would be the type to worry. But June is safe, so far she’s been safe.
She climbs the ladder propped against the side of the house, sensing the single guy right behind her, his body almost close enough to touch. On the roof, they drink pale ales and sit on lawn chairs, only there aren’t enough lawn chairs, so she and the single one sit on the slanted part of the roof, their knees not quite touching.
The men talk about high school, college, stories from their shared youth. The time they threw a field party in the pouring rain and the field became a big mud wrestling pit, or the time where they drove down to South Padre, not realizing how far away it was, so by the time they got there, they had to turn around so as not to miss Oscar’s debate competition. June holds her sweating beer and leans into the sandpapery roof. Savors how when the Single One speaks to his friends, he looks at her first and looks at her last, her, the bookend.
The men aren’t particularly cool or notable, but she savors the intimacy of her observations. Their awe at the late hour, how they don’t have late nights so often anymore, and June knows she’s a vestige of the old life. The life where you made bad decisions and stayed out too late and picked up random girls and were glad when your friends were getting laid even when you weren’t. She’s an anecdote, at best, a singular detail in a long life, but so are they, she thinks. That’s all this is, one night unlike the rest, to be remembered in all its blurry detail. Its haze of departing youth.
They stay reminiscing on the roof until Mark’s wife wakes up and after some hushed words the night’s officially over. Before they leave the roof, the single one pulls June close and kisses her wetly. His lips rough and chapped, but there’s the sweetness of beer as well. Their bodies waver slightly in the breezeless dark.
A moment later they’re on the street in front of the house beside his parked car. Her car is still at the bar, so they decide they’ll go to his place. She says goodbye to his friends and sinks into his car’s leather seat. A girl-shaped person. What she knows how to be.
#
As the woman pulled off a fifth chestnut wig, another piece of her own hair came off with it. June pretended not to notice. The woman clutched the hair and put it in her pocket.
June moved toward a display of longer wigs in a darker shade of brown. “What about something here?”
The woman stared in the mirror, focused on a spot above her own reflection.
June continued. “Or something with a honey blond? I know you said your natural color but, maybe this one?” June held out the wig for the woman.
“Maybe I don’t need anything. I mean, who am I fooling?”
“Ma’am?” June turned to look at the woman.
The woman’s eyes were closed. Her fingers rested on her temples. “I just feel so ugly and sick. What does it matter what I look like?”
June hesitated, the wig soft between her fingers, what had been a real person’s hair.
“I really want to say why is this happening to me?” The woman blinked, her eyes red and veiny. She pressed her hands to her face. “But what a stupid thing to say.”
Gently, June took the wig in her hands and placed it on the woman’s head. Not a great fit, but so what. She adjusted it and tapped the woman’s shoulder. “But look how you get to be someone new? Isn’t that something at least?”
The woman sighed, made eye contact with June in the mirror. “You don’t get it, do you?”
And June didn’t. But she wanted to. There was that.
#
June and the Single One arrive at a sleek, modern-looking duplex in a neighborhood just north of the bar. He leads her straight to his bedroom where the walls are off-white and barren. The bedding cream and plush.
“Not a big decorator, huh?”
He laughs and pushes her on the bed. He’s cute, she’s decided. The way his hair falls to the side of his face. How strong his arms feel as they pin her down.
Now, if she’s honest, comes the part she’s been waiting for all night, since before she met him even. When he could have been anyone, but now he’s a someone, and so is she. How she loves this moment just before the sex when she’s the center of all his attention. The kinetic energy between herself and this other person. What can be more meaningful than that? To be wanted.
But she’s drunk, of course, so her thoughts aren’t quite clear even as she tries to savor the moment, though it’s something she’s never able to do. The loss inherent in the action. The memory, it never fully survives.
Before she processes what’s happening, they’re both naked. His hands stroke her sides, grab her ass, squeeze her breasts. He gazes into her eyes, but his eyes are glassy, and she imagines hers are, too. He kisses her neck, puts on a condom, says is this okay? and before she knows it he’s inside of her and they’re having sex and she’s pretending to feel pleasure, making sounds she thinks he wants to hear as his hands run over her back, through her hair and she can’t help but ache for this feeling of being touched, being known, but then it’s over, he’s come, asking if she came, too? his arms still holding her, but he’s tired, tired, and before long they aren’t touching anymore, two boats adrift in the white sea, and she curls into herself, tries to take up as little room as possible because that’s the way she likes to sleep, especially in strange places when she’s beside a body she doesn’t really know.
Later, she will remember the moment of closeness. Later she will make the night hers.
Her phone alarm goes off at 7:30 in the morning. Blank walls. Body of the guy, naked and pale and asleep.
June watches her chest rise and fall. She has to be at work in an hour and a half, which leaves her enough time to get her car, take a shower, and drive to work. And yet, here’s this body beside her. This body that may or may not want her in the light of day. Because drunk sex, that’s one thing, but in the morning, touch becomes a conscious act. And it’s strange to think of herself as a not conscious choice in another person’s life. Like there’s a day-June and a night-June and not everyone wants both.
She nudges him awake and feels suddenly shy.
He blinks, groggily, then closes his eyes and puts a hand on her thigh.
“So, I have to be at work in about an hour.”
“Yeah?” His eyes stay closed.
“Yeah.” She hesitates. “So, I’ll need a ride to my car?”
He opens his eyes to see her, and she registers just the tiniest bit of surprise, finding her there beside him. A stranger.
“Your hair—” he touches her head, not tender but curious. “For a wig, it looks so real.”
“Thanks.”
And what else is there to say? June gets dressed, tries not to expose herself, but it doesn’t matter. He isn’t looking.
When they get to the bar, she hesitates long enough for him to ask for her number, but she understands through experience it’s for show. And what comfort in the memory of being held when this avalanche of distance is the reality she’s left with? But no, he’s not the right one anyhow. How funny to imagine a world in which a stranger could be.
She gets home in time to take a long shower. Spends a moment as the room steams studying herself in the mirror. Her smeared eye make-up. Her hair, blond and thin, her own, of course, and how could anyone think otherwise? The hot water cleanses as it hits her neck rinsing the smell of cigarette out of her skin and hair.
She brews coffee. Puts it in a travel mug, gets to work in plenty of time. Punctual. This is who she is.
The morning is slow. Only three customers. Two young men doing their first drag show, and a young woman going to a costume party who wants something over-the-top. It’s easy work, fun really, and also satisfying, getting people what they want. Making them look the way they think they should, didn’t know they could.
Around lunchtime, Laine calls and June thinks about not answering, but then decides she will, just so Laine doesn’t worry, a habit she’s taken to lately when June is unresponsive.
“You doing okay?”
“I’d say a bit better than okay.” June laughs and tells all. The roof, the kiss under the stars, the gentle undressing and the hot passion. And the morning, the lingering looks. “Yeah. It was what I needed all right.”
“Would you want to see him again?”
June hesitates. “Hey, listen, a customer just walked in, but I’ll call you later, okay?”
Laine says, okay, and June hangs up. Eventually, she’ll call Laine back. Tell her maybe she’ll see him again, and when she doesn’t, that’ll be okay, too, because she owns that memory—they were so close—and that matters. It matters. It isn’t meaningless. And Laine will ask if this is what she really wants, if this makes her happy? And June will shrug, it’s the only life she has and she’s going to live it as best she knows. Each experience adding up to something, surely. Whatever that might be. And if not?
June runs her fingers through her hair, swallows. She smiles at the gray-haired woman, her hand touching the counter for support. “What is it you’re looking for today?”
Rebecca Bernard is the author of the story collection Our Sister Who Will Not Die (Mad Creek Books, 2022). Her fiction has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Oxford American, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Southern Indiana Review. She is an Assistant Professor of English at East Carolina University, and she serves as a fiction editor for The Boiler.
22 November 2024
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