Part Eight: The Veil Question
In September, three weeks before the wedding, my mother asked me about a veil.
We were at her kitchen table in the little house where I grew up. Eating leftover lasagna and looking at seating charts.
“You could wear a long one,” Mom said. “Cathedral length. It would cover your head. If you wanted.”
I thought about it.
I’d thought about it a lot.
“No,” I said.
Mom looked at me.
“I spent a year hiding,” I said. “Under hats. Under scarves. Under blankets on the couch.”
I touched my short, fuzzy curls.
“I want Ben to see me,” I said. “All of me. The way I am now.”
Mom put down her fork.
She reached across the table and took my hand.
“Then that’s exactly how you’re walking in,” she said.
Part Nine: Judith’s Calls
Judith called me four times in September.
The first time, she asked about a wig.
“The woman in Louisville can still do a rush order,” she said. “Three weeks. I’ll pay for it.”
“No, thank you, Judith,” I said.
The second time, she asked about a veil.
“A long one,” she said. “Cathedral length. It would be very elegant.”
“I’m not wearing a veil,” I said.
The third time, she asked about the photographer.
“Have you talked to him about angles?” she said. “There are ways to photograph a bride so certain things aren’t so…noticeable.”
“No, Judith,” I said.
The fourth time, she called Ben.
I wasn’t there. I found out later.
She called him at school. During his lunch period. He stepped out into the hallway to take it.
“Benjamin,” she said. “Your father and I have invited two hundred people to this wedding. Partners from Robert’s practice. The entire board of the Philharmonic. The Garden Club.”
She paused.
“Do you understand what people are going to think,” she said, “when your bride walks down the aisle bald?”
Ben told me he stood in the hallway of Henry Clay High School for a long time.
Then he said something he’d never said to his mother in thirty-one years.
“Mom,” he said. “If you say one more word about Molly’s hair, don’t come to the wedding.”
He hung up.
Judith didn’t call again.
She sent an RSVP card. Robert and Judith Whitaker. Two attending.
I thought it was over.
Part Ten: The Wedding Day
So that brings us back to the bride’s room. 1:40 in the afternoon. October 14th.
My mother. My sister. The pink velvet loveseat. Love Is Patient over the door.
“Are you sure you don’t want a veil?” Mom asked.
One more time. Gently. Just to be sure.
“I want Ben to see me,” I said. “All of me.”
Mom smiled.
“Then that’s exactly how you’re walking in,” she said.
She stepped behind me. She looked at me in the mirror. My short auburn curls. My lace sleeves. My bare, healthy face.
She put her hands on my shoulders.
“You’re beautiful,” she said.
Claire came and stood beside her.
“You look like a fairy,” she said. “A really tough fairy.”
I laughed.
Part Eleven: The Doors
An hour later, Dad took my arm outside the church doors.
My father, Paul, is fifty-eight. He’s an electrician. Big and quiet, with a gray mustache and enormous calloused hands. He cried at every chemo appointment he came to. He tried to hide it behind the hospital coffee cup. It never worked.
He was wearing a gray suit he’d rented from the Men’s Wearhouse. It was too tight in the shoulders.
“Ready?” he asked.
I looked at the double doors. At the stained glass windows on either side. At the sunlight coming through them in red and gold and blue.
I could hear the organ playing softly inside. The murmur of two hundred people.
“Is it too late to elope?” I asked.
Dad smiled.
“Your mother would find us,” he said.
I laughed.
Then the music started.
Part Twelve: Halfway
The doors opened.
St. Andrew’s is an old church. Built in 1892. Red brick. White columns. Tall stained glass windows down both sides. Wooden pews, dark and polished from a hundred and thirty years of Sunday mornings.
It was full.
Two hundred people. My side on the left. Ben’s on the right.
My side was smaller. Teachers from Cassidy Elementary. My kindergarten parents. Nurses from the oncology floor at Markey who’d taken care of me. Dr. Reyes, in a blue dress, sitting in the fourth row.
My grandmother. Ninety-one years old. In a wheelchair at the end of the second pew.
Ben’s side was bigger. Doctors in expensive suits. Women in pearls and hats. The board of the Philharmonic. The Garden Club.
Everyone stood up.
And then I saw Ben.
He was waiting at the altar. In a navy suit. His hair was back now, short and dark, but he’d buzzed it again for the wedding. To match mine.
He was smiling.
The biggest, goofiest, most wonderful smile I’ve ever seen.
He was crying.
Dad and I started walking.
Slowly. One step at a time. My flat shoes on the old red carpet.
Past my kindergarten parents, who waved. Past the nurses from Markey, who were already crying. Past Dr. Reyes, who gave me a thumbs up.
I made it halfway down the aisle.
Then Judith stood up.
Part Thirteen: The Wig
She was sitting in the second pew on Ben’s side. The aisle seat. Next to Robert.
She was wearing a pale blue suit and pearls. Her blonde bob was perfect.
She stood up.
“Judith?” I said.
She stepped out into the aisle.
Right in front of me. Blocking my way.
She was holding something.
A blonde wig.
Long. Shoulder-length. Honey-colored. Real human hair, carefully styled in loose waves. The kind from the woman in Louisville.
She held it out to me with both hands.
“Put this on,” she said. “Quickly.”
I stared at it.
“What?” I said.
Judith’s voice rose.
Loud enough for the whole church to hear.
“Your bald head,” she said, “is an embarrassment to our family!”
Part Fourteen: The Music Stopped
The music stopped.
The organist took her hands off the keys. The last chord hung in the air. Then it faded.
Two hundred people stood frozen in the pews.
“Mom!” Ben shouted.
From the altar. His face had gone white.
“What are you doing?”
“Saving the photographs!” Judith said.
She turned and looked at him.
“Two hundred people, Benjamin,” she said. “The photographer. The videographer. These pictures will be on your mantel for fifty years.”
She turned back to me.
“Put it on,” she said. “We can still salvage this.”
“Judith,” I said. My voice was shaking. “Please move.”
“Don’t be stubborn,” Judith said. “Everyone’s staring.”
“Because you’re holding a wig,” Dad said quietly beside me, “in the middle of a wedding.”
A few guests let out nervous laughs.
I wanted to disappear.
I wanted to turn around and run back up the aisle and through the doors and into the parking lot. I wanted to crawl under the pink velvet loveseat in the bride’s room. I wanted to pull a hat over my head and a blanket over my body and never come out.
A year of chemo. Twelve infusions. Four weeks of radiation. A clean PET scan.
And I was standing in the middle of the aisle at my own wedding, with my mother-in-law holding a wig in front of my face.
My hand went to my head.
To my short auburn curls.
Ben started down the aisle.
He came down the three steps from the altar. Fast. His face was red now. His jaw was clenched.
“Put that away, Mom,” he said. “Right now.”
But my mother was already standing.
Part Fifteen: Mom
She was in the front pew on my side. The aisle seat. Where the mother of the bride sits.
She was wearing a dark green dress and a matching jacket. Her hair was short and silver, in a neat pixie cut.
She stood up.
She stepped out into the aisle.
“Excuse me, Judith,” she said.
Judith turned.
She saw my mother.
She rolled her eyes.
“Oh,” Judith said. “Don’t you start.”
My mother didn’t answer her.
She turned to my sister, sitting beside her in the front pew.
“Claire,” she said. “Hold my purse.”
Claire took it. She looked confused.
“Mom?” I whispered.
My mother looked at me.
At my lace sleeves. My bare face. My short auburn curls.
At my hand, still pressed against my head.
“You spent a year fighting to get here,” she said.
Her voice was steady. Quiet. Firm.
“You are not hiding today,” she said.
Part Sixteen: The Pastor
Then she turned to the pastor.
Pastor James Holloway had been the pastor at St. Andrew’s for twenty-two years. He baptized me. He confirmed me. He sat with my family in the hospital the night I was diagnosed.
He was standing at the altar in his white robe. Holding his Bible. Frozen.
“Pastor James,” my mother said. “Could you help me with something?”
She walked up the aisle toward him.
Past Judith. Past me. Past Ben, who was standing in the aisle now, a few feet from his mother.
She went up the three steps to the altar.
She leaned close to Pastor James.
She said something to him. Quietly. Nobody could hear.
He listened.
His face changed.
He looked at my mother for a long time.
Then he looked at Judith.
Then back at my mother.
“Are you certain, ma’am?” he asked quietly.
“Absolutely,” Mom said.
Pastor James set down his Bible on the altar.
He stepped behind my mother.
He reached up with both hands.
And when he stepped aside to let her through, the entire church went silent.
Part Seventeen: Mom’s Hair
My mother was bald.
The pastor had unpinned her wig.
Her short, silver, neat pixie cut. The one she’d worn for fifteen years. The one she got done every six weeks at a salon on Euclid Avenue.
It wasn’t hers.
Pastor James was holding it in his hands. A soft silver wig, with a mesh cap and a row of tiny bobby pins along the edge.
And my mother stood at the altar of St. Andrew’s Methodist Church with her head completely bare.
Smooth. Pale. A few faint scars above her left ear.
Not a single hair.
I couldn’t breathe.
I knew.
I’d always known. Since I was fourteen.
But I’d never seen it. Not in fifteen years. Not once.
Part Eighteen: Fifteen Years
My mother had breast cancer when I was fourteen.
Stage two. Triple negative. Aggressive.
She had a double mastectomy and eight rounds of chemotherapy and six weeks of radiation. At St. Joseph Hospital, where she worked in the ER.
She lost her hair. All of it. In the spring of 2010.
It never grew back.
That happens sometimes. Rarely. One in a few hundred patients. A specific kind of chemotherapy damages the hair follicles permanently.
Permanent chemotherapy-induced alopecia, the doctors called it.
Mom got her first wig in the fall of 2010. A silver pixie cut. The closest thing she could find to her real hair, before it went.
She wore it to work. To church. To my high school graduation. To Claire’s wedding. To every Christmas and every Thanksgiving and every birthday party for fifteen years.
She never once took it off in front of anyone but Dad. Not even Claire and me.
I asked her about it once. When I was sixteen.
“Why don’t you ever go without it?” I said. “Even at home?”
Mom was quiet for a long time.
“Because people look at you differently,” she said finally. “When they can see you’ve been sick. They feel sorry for you. They look at you like you might break.”
She touched her wig.
“I didn’t want you girls to look at me like that,” she said. “Every day. Over breakfast.”
When I lost my hair, I asked her to show me.
Just once. So I’d know it was okay.
She couldn’t.
“I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “I just—I can’t.”
Part Nineteen: What Mom Said
My mother stood at the altar.
Bald. In her dark green dress. Under the stained glass.
Two hundred people stared at her.
She didn’t look at them.
She looked at Judith.
“Judith,” she said.
Her voice carried through the whole church. She didn’t need a microphone. Thirty years in an emergency room teaches you how to make yourself heard.
“I’ve worn a wig for fifteen years,” she said.
Judith didn’t say anything. She was still holding the blonde wig in both hands.
“I had breast cancer in 2010,” Mom said. “My hair never came back. I’ve hidden it every single day since.”
She looked out at the church. At two hundred faces.
“From my husband’s coworkers. From the women at church. From my own daughters.”
“I hid it,” Mom said, “because I believed exactly what you just said.”
She looked at Judith.
“That it was an embarrassment,” she said. “That people would look at me and see a sick woman. That the right thing to do was cover it up so nobody had to be uncomfortable.”
“And then my daughter got sick,” Mom said.
She looked at me.
“And I watched her lose her hair at twenty-eight,” she said. “And I shaved her head in her kitchen. And I watched her look at herself in the mirror and say, Oh.”
Her voice cracked.
“And she asked me to show her mine,” Mom said. “Just once. So she’d know it was okay.”
She looked down.
“And I couldn’t,” she said. “I was too ashamed.”
The church was completely silent.
“My daughter is braver than I am,” Mom said.
She looked at me.
“She spent a year fighting,” she said. “Twelve rounds of chemo. Four weeks of radiation. And three weeks ago, she sat at my kitchen table and told me she wanted to walk down this aisle without a veil.”
She smiled through her tears.
“She said, I want Ben to see me. All of me.”
She turned back to Judith.
“So if anybody in this church,” Mom said, “needs to be embarrassed about a bald head today—”
She touched her own bare scalp.
“It should be me,” she said. “For hiding mine for fifteen years.”