Notes From the Underwire: Adventures From My Awkward and Lovely Life by Quinn Cummings

Author:Quinn Cummings [Cummings, Quinn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humor, Women, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, Essays, Form, Entertainment & Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781401394509
Google: JbCZAAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 2009-07-07T07:00:00+00:00

Years before, when she had applied for her current job, “Must have my own bathroom” certainly wasn’t on my mother’s wish list; but, as luck would have it, the only office available when she started happened to have its own private bathroom. This wasn’t the executive bathroom. It wasn’t even a nice bathroom—the sink was a mural of rust stains and using the toilet required balancing oneself on a stack of toner cartridges—but by the second day of chemotherapy my mother was very grateful for its proximity.

Never a large person, my mother lost nearly twenty pounds in three weeks. By the second week, her hair was starting to fall out. By the fourth week, she was almost hairless. Within a month, I had a fragile, vomiting, bald mother. The hair loss extended to her eyebrows and eyelashes, giving her the effect of having been partially erased. During this entire time not one single coworker asked after her health. I like to think this was owing to discretion on their part, but it’s more likely because fourteen-year-olds aren’t the only humans incapable of seeing anyone but themselves.

When her hair started to go, my mother and I spent a Saturday visiting every single wig store in Los Angeles County. There seemed to be three colors of wig: a light-absorbing black, a coppery red Lucille Ball would have rejected as too garish, and beige. Regardless of color, every wig tended to be cut into a shape resembling an old lady’s swim cap and had the effect of informing everyone in a visible radius that you were wearing artificial hair. After the last store on our roster, we got back into the car and I looked over at my mother. In her youth, she had been a runway model and even after she stepped off her last catwalk, she continued to possess the style and grace of someone who expected to move through life looking good. Now, nothing fit her stressed frame; no color flattered her ashen skin. She was living in someone else’s body, wearing someone else’s clothes. Her expression staring out over the steering wheel was one I had never seen before on her in my life. She looked beaten. The temperature in the parked car was, conservatively, six hundred degrees. The combination of this sudden sauna-like heat and her exhaustion from the chemotherapy and futile wig-shopping caused my mother to look nearly dead. Frightened, I tried to lift her spirits.

“That last one wasn’t as bad as some of the others,” I piped, but my voice died away as I watched her face crumple, her head lean against the steering wheel. She sobbed in terror while I sat there, sweating, breathing hard, and shredding the list of American Cancer Society–approved wig shops between my trembling fingers.

A few days later, I began having weekly conversations with my half-brother—the grown son of my father’s first marriage. He was a good guy, kindhearted and funny, but I could count on two hands the number of times we’d been in each other’s company.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.