I'll Be You(54)

Caleb eyed the pile of hair on his bathroom tile. “You could save it, make a wig,” he offered.

“No, Mae should have it. She can use it for her art projects.”

Mae descended on the hair with a broom and a box, as Caleb walked me to the front door. We stopped there, an awkwardness descending between us. He examined me, running his eyes across my scalp. I felt naked then.

“You look beautiful,” he said. “Is it weird to say that? It makes you look…”

“Like a cancer patient?”

He shook his head. “I was going to say otherworldly. Like something fallen from the sky. Not quite from here.”

I thought about the women I’d seen in Ojai. That wasn’t exactly what I’d thought when I’d seen their shorn heads; and yet there had been something alien and strange about the way they looked. I wondered if that was the point that GenFem was making with this haircut: They wanted their members to feel unearthly.

Or—more alarmingly—inhuman.

“Thank you, I guess?” I said. “And I’m sorry about the other night. I really appreciate you taking care of me. It might have been so much worse if you hadn’t been there to help.”

He looked down at his bare feet, where blond strands of my hair were still tangled between his hairy toes. “I was glad to be the one you called.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I’ve been there, too. You can’t do it alone.”

“I’d say let’s try dinner again, without the wine, but I have to head back to Los Angeles after this,” I said.

He smiled. “Well, that’s not so terribly far. We could still make it happen.”

Mae was watching us so I just kissed him on the cheek, letting my lips linger there for a significant second. The whiskers on his chin were the same length as the stubble on my head, a sandpaper attraction.

He pulled back and smiled at me. “Please be careful,” he said.



* * *



—

I found the dress I needed in a shop in Ojai. It took most of the afternoon, walking in and out of boutiques all along the main road through town, looking for the right kind of shapeless white shift. Eventually, on a side street, I came across a small shop with batik scarves fluttering from its awning. In the window was a display of bright saris and shalwar kameez and other garments appropriated from countries on the other side of the planet and brought here, to be sold to professional creatives with six-figure salaries who wanted to look “nonconformist.”

I almost walked past the place entirely, deterred by the spangles and color, but as I passed by I glimpsed a flash of something pale and ghostlike through the glass. I stopped and went in, as a trio of overhead bells rang out my presence. The saleswoman behind the counter looked up and smiled. Then she clocked my new haircut, and her smile grew wider, stiffer, falser.

I reached up, ran my hand across my bare scalp, felt the fine stubble tickling my palm. She knew exactly who I was, I realized—or rather, who I was trying to be.

“You’re here for one of these?” she said, already reaching for the rack of white cotton dresses that hung behind her. She pulled one out, seemingly at random, her eyes locked nervously on mine. She had a kombucha glow to her, with long braided hair, tiny bells chiming off her wrists. It did not appear that she was inclined to like me.

I nodded, took the dress from her. “You sell these to…?” I wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence. The women in the compound? GenFem? That cult? But she was already nodding, eyeing me like I was a spy from enemy territory.

“You don’t really need to try it on. It’s one-size-fits-all.”

I shook my head, reached for my purse. “What is it?” I said. “The dress. In real life, I mean.”

“It’s from Cambodia. For morning.”

“Why do you wear it in the morning?”

“Mourning,” she corrected me. “As in, death.”

She counted change for me, her eyes flicking to the top of my head and then away again. When she was done, I asked her to point me to a dressing room, where I swapped my cutoffs and tank top for the dress. It slid over my head, loose and shapeless, a cocoon of soft cotton. I stared at the alien creature standing before me in the mirror. Caleb was right: I did look otherworldly. It was something about the effect of the pale head and the billowing dress, something angelic and deathly at the same time.

A terrible thought struck me: What if Elli hadn’t shaved her head? What if she looked exactly the same, and I’d just jumped to the wrong conclusion? What if I was the one who had just donned cult clothes for no reason?

It was too late to worry. I stood there for a moment more, listening to the saleslady pace back and forth outside the dressing room door. I practiced rounding my shoulders, a slight sideways tilt to my neck, a softening of my eyes, until I finally saw her in the mirror looking back at me.

Elli.

My performance wasn’t perfect; it had been too long since I’d studied my sister closely, and clearly she’d done some changing. But it would have to be good enough.

On the way out of the shop, I hesitated, and turned to the saleslady.

“I’m not one of them,” I said. “I’m just acting.”

She nodded, eyes big, not believing, wanting me to leave. I shrugged apologetically, then opened the door. The bells chattered overhead, marking my departure with a chilling finality.